Various situations require verifying the date on which a document was created. For example, log books, journals, diaries, and engineering notebooks have information that is time sensitive. That is, the date and time at which the information was documented may be important for regulatory compliance or for evidentiary purposes.
The advent of electronic documents, for example, word processing documents, appears to have complicated rather than simplified the management of time sensitive documents. Since electronic documents are easily modified, often without evidence of having been changed, it may be desirable to print, time-stamp, and archive a document to preserve evidence of the document's authenticity. Thus, while the characteristics of electronic documents enable quick production and modification, electronic documents may require a redundant process for archival.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,647, entitled, “Method for Secure Time-Stamping of Digital Documents” to Haber et al. and issued on Aug. 4, 1992 is incorporated herein by reference. U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,647 addresses some problems related to the certification of electronic documents. The process of U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,647 generally entails generating a certificate as a function of the data comprising the document, the current time, and an assortment of additional data that is described in the patent. The electronic document and certificate can then be stored for later reference, and the authenticity of the electronic document can be later verified by using the stored electronic document and the certificate as described in the patent.
The method described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,647 appears to provide a viable solution to the problem of certification of electronic documents. However, as recognized with the present invention, various situations require more than certification of electronic documents. For example, journals, diaries, and engineering notebooks will likely involve generating multiple electronic documents. Thus, archiving the documents and certificates in a manner that provides for easy retrieval may be cumbersome. To further complicate matters, an organization may have many people generating their own electronic documents for journals, diaries, and notebooks, and the documents may have various relationships. Thus, the present invention recognizes the deficiencies of present systems for convenient cataloging and fast identification and retrieval of related documents and their associated certificates. A method and system that address the aforementioned problems, as well as other related problems, are therefore desirable.